New Feeds

I’m not seeking out a lot of new blogs at the moment. With my recent lifestyle changes I am not having as much time for reading blogs and commenting as I used to do. My apologies if I have been a bit absent from your comments sections, it is not you, it is me, focusing on me. I will be back soon, I promise!

If the lack of blog additions continues, I might only post new feeds once every two months for a while.

New blogs to the feed reader since 30th November –

Welcome to my feedreader, bloggers.

There are 4 of you. In my internet travels I found my way to your blog, often because I read a blogger who linked to you. I liked your blog a lot. While there, I probably read back about 40+ posts or so. Then I added you to my feedreader.

Most of you will know what a feedreader is, but in case you do not, click here for info. The quick run down – it is an awesome program which collects new articles that bloggers post. So when you post something new, I get a copy, and if I have the time and something to say, I will click through and comment.

At the end of 6 months or so, if I am still loving your blog as much as I did when I added you to my feed reader, I will add you to my permanent blogroll. YAY!

A Note For Bloglovin’ People

Did I follow you this month on Bloglovin however you do not see your blog listed here? That means you followed me, I followed you back, but I did not add you to my feed reader. It is not you, it is me. It might be one of the following things – you use a partial feed – I did not love your content – your blog was not interesting to me – you use too many photos and/or gifs – your blog is written in a language I do not understand. If you want to know why specifically, you can contact me and ask.

June & July New Feed Review –

Did you notice I took a sneaky month off from new feeds in December? I have gone through the review process and the blogs which I am keeping are these –

Why did I unsubscribe from 19 of the June blogs and 11 of the July blogs? The reasons are as follows listed in no particular order – taken from my blog posts 14 Reasons and 10 New Reasons I unsubscribed from blogs.

Blogs With A Partial Feed. Where Are You? They Are A Wanna-be. I’m Overwhelmed. Too Many GIFS All The Time. The blog was deleted.

Feed Bundles

If you have dropped by the blog lately, you might have noticed a couple of new things in the sidebar. A while back, someone asked me if I could put together a list of my favourite blogs. I finally got around to doing that, but then I thought.. I should not stop there. So I have created 4 bundles.

– Updated Often – the remaining 16 feeds from my main blogroll who sometimes post more than 2 posts a day.

– Test Drives – All the 315 blogs I am test driving (current as at 30/11)

The reason for the Updated Often bundle is because if I put those blogs in with the other blogs, sometimes you’d see anywhere between 3-16 posts in a row for the same blog which works ok in the bundle but does *not* work ok when I’ve put all these bundles as RSS feeds in the blog sidebar, showing 20 posts at a time for each bundle. So I just pulled those blogs out and put them in their own bundle.

So, if you are looking for new blogs to read, you can check out the bundles. If you click on the links above it will take you to the bundle page where you can scroll through and see if a photo or title catches your eye. This is one reason many people recommend putting a photo with each post. If your feed is partial, people will probably not see any of your images, they might only get a title and some text.

Blogroll Update

While I was doing the mammoth task above, I also went through the blogroll, updating it to the most current list yet. I added * to the blogs which are in the favourites folders purely to make it easier for me to keep track of them when I update the blogroll in future as the process is a bit of a nightmare.

What is the difference between Main Blogroll and Snoskred Favourites? It is pretty simple. In my feed reader I have many folders. I organise it this way for two reasons – so that I can keep track of the monthly new feeds and so that the blogs can be read in bite size chunks. That is important when you are reading nearly 600 of them. It looks like this –

Blogs in my favourites folders are simply the ones I want to read first. They are the blogs that I sit down with my morning coffee to read and enjoy enormously – both the coffee, and the blog posts.. They originally would have started out in other folders.

It might have been one post – like this one from rusty duck – I remember reading that post and moving that blog to favourites simply because I was intrigued and thinking I want to watch this garden journey.

It might have been a feeling that developed over several posts. It might be once I read the favourites folders, I found myself heading to their folder wondering “Did X post something today?” – that is when I know they have to make a folder move.

It might be that they comment on my blog regularly. It might be that I love the subjects they are writing about. It might be that they own chickens or have gorgeous pets. It might be that I feel a kinship to them. It might be many, many other things.

They are from all kinds of places – Australia, Canada, the UK, Europe, the USA – Hawaii has an unfair share of people in the favourites folder. There are many different kinds of people. They write about many different subjects, food, family, fashion, travel, gardening, chooks, photography, astronomy, living frugally, living life, television and more.

I might not love every post they write. There might be some posts I scroll past quickly. In general though, 99% of their posts I do enjoy.

I usually try to leave test drive blogs in their original folders until their 6 months is up, but there are times I know a blog has become a favourite and I move it ahead of time. October already has 3 blogs which have moved into favourites.

Blogs not in my favourites folders are not less interesting to me, nor does it mean their posts are not read by me. There is every chance tomorrow they will be yanked out of their present folder and into “faves11” which does exist and is waiting for blogs to appear in it.

Blogs in my favourites folder rarely move out of there, and they are rarely unsubscribed from. I will tolerate some things from my favourites which I might not tolerate from a main blogroll blog, and I certainly would not tolerate at all from a test drive blog. Like what, you ask?

UNSUBSCRIBE ME

There I am, on a peaceful Friday, scrolling through my feed reader.. and all of a sudden, a massive Huntsman photo appears as a surprise to me. Seriously? That is Not Cool, people. I hit unsubscribe within moments, then removed that blog from my blogroll and my Inoreader bundle. My skin was crawling for several hours. Ugh!

As a blogger, I am well aware that people are reading what I write and viewing what I post. I know there are people out there who fear these particular creatures. I would never, ever, post a photo of a snake or a spider on my blog without using a Read More tag. I’d write a little thing at the end of the post that said “Hey, I’m about to post a photo of a spider (snake) so if you are ok with seeing that, you can click here to see it”.

I guess I will have to start working on my next reasons I unsubscribe post. :) Here the current ones – 14 Reasons and 10 New Reasons I unsubscribed from blogs.

However if a favourite posted a spider pic, I’d be annoyed, sure! I’d still have the skin crawling thing, but I’d get over it and keep reading the blog. This is not an invitation to my favourites to start posting that kind of thing, please don’t do that. ;)

Going Forward

I’m going to try and only touch the blogroll and bundles once a month when I do the new feeds post. Right now, I unsubscribe somewhat willy nilly but whenever I do it, I go in and remove the blog from the blogroll if it was there, and I remove it from the bundles. This has resulted in occasional chaos, so it must stop. :) I might make a new folder and call it unsubscribes, to try and keep track of them.

Welcome to my feedreader, bloggers.

There are 21 of you. In my internet travels I found my way to your blog, often because I read a blogger who linked to you. I liked your blog a lot. While there, I probably read back about 40+ posts or so. Then I added you to my feedreader.

Most of you will know what a feedreader is, but in case you do not, click here for info. The quick run down – it is an awesome program which collects new articles that bloggers post. So when you post something new, I get a copy, and if I have the time and something to say, I will click through and comment.

At the end of 6 months or so, if I am still loving your blog as much as I did when I added you to my feed reader, I will add you to my permanent blogroll. YAY!

A Note For Bloglovin’ People

Did I follow you this month on Bloglovin however you do not see your blog listed here? That means you followed me, I followed you back, but I did not add you to my feed reader. It is probably not you, it is me. :)

If it *is* you, it might be one of the following things – you use a partial feed – your rss feed did not work or was not found – I did not love your content – your blog was not interesting to me – you use too many photos and/or gifs – your blog is written in a language I do not understand – too many sponsored posts or affiliate links. You can always contact me and ask why.

May New Feed Review –

And it has now been six months since May, so this month I have gone through the review process and the blogs which I am keeping are these –

Why did I unsubscribe from 12 of the 24 blogs? The reasons are as follows listed in no particular order – taken from my blog posts 14 Reasons and 10 New Reasons I unsubscribed from blogs.

Blogs with a partial feed– I’m Not Feeling It – Where Are You? – The Content Went AWOL – and I have to add a new one – 404 not found – their blog just disappeared – this happened to two blogs on the list this month!

An Important Notice –

I mentioned earlier this week that I was not adding any more partial feeds to my feed reader. If I followed you on Bloglovin or WordPress this month and your blog does not appear in the below list, serving up a partial feed is the reason why. Presently I am reading over 600 blogs, which is a LOT of blogs, and the frustration I feel when I see a partial feed post simply is not fun or enjoyable for me. If you switch back to a full feed, let me know and I will subscribe in my feed reader.

Welcome to my feedreader, bloggers.

There are 66 of you. In my internet travels I found my way to your blog, often because I read a blogger who linked to you. I liked your blog a lot. While there, I probably read back about 40+ posts or so. Then I added you to my feedreader.

Most of you will know what a feedreader is, but in case you do not, click here for info. The quick run down – it is an awesome program which collects new articles that bloggers post. So when you post something new, I get a copy, and if I have the time and something to say, I will click through and comment.

Update – I have created a brand new Inoreader Bundle with all the current blogs I have in the feed reader, and I have added an RSS feed to the sidebar which will – eventually – show the latest 20 posts.. :) right now it is showing the posts as they were put into Inoreader instead of most recent.

I’m OVER partial feeds. If I add a feed into my feed reader only to discover it is a partial feed, I am unsubscribing right away and the blog will not appear in the monthly new feeds list. No matter how much I might have wanted to read that blog or enjoyed the content I saw there!

If a blogger is going to make me click through to their blog for every post in full, I’m out. Even if they are an amazing writer. Even if I really love what I saw on their blog.

Consider This –

Do bloggers really want to make their readers jump through hoops to read their content? I’m not a performing dog. :) Ain’t nobody got time for that shiznit! If I like the post and I have the time, I’m going to click through and comment.

If a blogger gives me a tiny snippet of their post and what is there does not seem interesting, I’m not clicking through. Sorry. :( A partial feed is simply a terrible concept when bloggers want people to read their writing. Those bloggers are frustrating your readers, and that content they worked so hard on is likely going to be left unread.

Current Reads –

For partial feeds already in the feed reader, I went through my feeds during October. I unsubscribed from all partial feed blogs and removed them from the blogroll. There are only two exceptions to this –

– You comment here on a regular basis and/or I comment at yours regularly.

I also unsubscribed from blogs that had stopped posting, and blogs that use too many large photos as they take a long time to download, and can be very irritating. If you do not know how to resize your images, find out! Here is a post from Sephy that will help you.

Content Scraping –

If the reason you are using a partial feed is because you are worried about content scraping, there are things you can do that do not involve a partial feed – like these –

But Wait, I’m Not Sure –

Do you know what kind of feed you are providing to your readers? If you do not, you had best subscribe to your own blog and find out. You should always subscribe to your own blog so you can make sure your content is appearing exactly how you want it to appear.

A partial feed is part of a post – eg, the first 20-50 characters and sometimes a photo as well. I do have blogs where all I get is the title of a post, sometimes the title and a photo and no text. None of those things are remotely tempting me to click through. In fact, what they are doing is making me feel annoyed and frustrated.

In Conclusion –

There are a lot of blogs out there in the world. I’d like to read all of them however there are not enough hours in the day. Presently I am reading over 600 blogs, which is a LOT of blogs, and the frustration I feel when I see a partial feed post simply is not fun or enjoyable for me.

It is mostly me, but bloggers who are using a partial feed, it is partly you too. If you are a blogger who only cares about blog stats and people clicking through to your blog, feel free to keep using partial feeds. I won’t be reading your blog, though. :/

Over To You –

What are your thoughts on partial feeds?

If you were using a partial feed but have gone back to full, let me know as I may have already unsubscribed.

As you read yesterday, this month is a little different to our usual New Feeds. Normally when I add a new blog to the feed reader, I have read back 20-40 posts and decided that I liked the content and wanted to read more.

This month, I did not visit the blogs themselves – only the blog page on Bloglovin. There were three criteria –

– They must be following a blog I already follow
– They must have posted something recently – Sep/Aug
– Is the content I can see interesting to me.

It should be noted that Bloglovin does not show much in the way of content – you only get a photo, the headline and maybe two sentences of text at most. So there is a chance not very many of these blogs will be long term keepers for me.

I will mention that anyone who has followed me gets an automatic follow back and a link below if they have a blog of their own, so there are a couple of blogs in here which are in different languages to the one I speak.

Important note –

If I followed you in September but your blog is not listed below, it is not listed on my blogroll, and you do not appear in my last 6 months of new feeds posts, please let me know in the comments so I can make sure to add your blog to this list. :)

Welcome to my feedreader, bloggers.

There are 274 of you. You are now grouped into folders of 20 blogs each, in my feed reader.

Most of you will know what a feedreader is, but in case you do not, click here for info. The quick run down – it is an awesome program which collects new articles that bloggers post. So when you post something new, I get a copy, and if I have the time and something to say, I will click through and comment.

What Happens Now?

I will test drive your blog for 6 months, then all the blogs listed will be evaluated. I will decide whether or not to keep following them in my feed reader, and I will post the keepers here as I always do – so make sure to check back on 31 March to see if I kept you. Keepers will be added to the permanent blogroll.

Non Bloglovin’ Blogs for September –

I did add 20 non-Bloglovin blogs to the feed reader this month. I went along with my Bloglovin plan though – I did not read back through 40 posts or so, I took a look at a couple of posts and if I liked what I saw, I added it.

Why did I unsubscribe from 3 of the 11 blogs? The reasons are as follows listed in no particular order – taken from my blog posts 14 Reasons and 10 New Reasons I unsubscribed from blogs.

Posts too long – I’m Not Feeling It.

There are also two other reasons this month – one of the blogs Leslie Beslie went on hiatus and is email subscription only – I subbed because I enjoy that blog.

Then there is a whole other situation that happened with a blog. I originally loved the blog and even mentioned it here in a post, but I was treated unkindly in the comments section there more than once.

I discovered via an email exchange with the blog owner after one such unkind incident that the person running the blog is completely up themselves *and* an egotistical beyotch. According to her, it is perfectly fine that people treated me unkindly because her blog is popular. *boggle* I decided life is too short for that kind of shiznit and kicked that blog to the kerb. :(

Welcome to my feedreader, bloggers.

There are 18 of you. In my internet travels I found my way to your blog, often because I read a blogger who linked to you. I liked your blog a lot. While there, I probably read back about 40+ posts or so. Then I added you to my feedreader.

Most of you will know what a feedreader is, but in case you do not, click here for info. The quick run down – it is an awesome program which collects new articles that bloggers post. So when you post something new, I get a copy, and if I have the time and something to say, I will click through and comment.

A Note About Next Month

I’m planning to go on a new blog finding spree over the next couple of months. The first month, I am going to find some new blogs via Bloglovin’. This will actually be more difficult than it sounds because I do not read my blogs via Bloglovin’ – I have my own custom feed reader on the home server here which I use for that.

At the moment if I want to follow a new blog, I copy the link and add it into my feed reader. At the end of each month, I copy the blog links into my notepad file, followed by the blog title. This system works pretty well for me.

This month I am hoping to find blogs written by the followers of the blogs I already know, love and enjoy. If they follow the same blogs I do, chances are I might like their blog as well. So I am setting off into an unknown dimension. I’m a little bit excited about it to be honest.

My planned process for September will be – I will follow the blog on Bloglovin’, then copy the link to their blog into my personal feed reader, then add each link into my notepad as I go along to keep from having to double up the work at the end of the month. If all goes well, you can expect the new feeds September list to be fairly lengthy. :)

Welcome to my feedreader, bloggers.

There are 31 of you. In my internet travels I found my way to your blog, often because I read a blogger who linked to you. I liked your blog a lot. While there, I probably read back about 40+ posts or so. Then I added you to my feedreader.

Most of you will know what a feedreader is, but in case you do not, click here for info. The quick run down – it is an awesome program which collects new articles that bloggers post. So when you post something new, I get a copy, and if I have the time and something to say, I will click through and comment.

Welcome to my feedreader, bloggers.

There are 55 of you. In my internet travels I found my way to your blog, often because I read a blogger who linked to you or perhaps you left a comment on a blog I read which I thought was excellent and I wanted to know more about you. I liked your blog a lot. While there, I probably read back about 40+ posts or so. Then I added you to my feedreader.

Most of you will know what a feedreader is, but in case you do not, click here for info. The quick run down – it is an awesome program which collects new articles that bloggers post. So when you post something new, I get a copy, and if I have the time and something to say, I will click through and comment. If you want to get a feed reader, I highly recommend Inoreader, which I have been using a lot lately.

At the end of 6 months or so, if I am still loving your blog as much as I did when I added you to my feed reader, I will add you to my permanent blogroll. YAY!

December New Feed Review –

I took a month off in December 2014, so this month I have no feeds to review. YAY it is nice to have a break every now and then.

Is your blog not listed on my blog but you would like it to be? Email Snoskred via the contact page with a link to your blog and Snoskred will add your blog to her feed reader. :) Or you can leave a comment on my blog with a link to your place, I’ll drop by.

Welcome to my feedreader, bloggers.

There are 24 of you. In my internet travels I found my way to your blog, often because I read a blogger who linked to you. I liked your blog a lot. While there, I probably read back about 40+ posts or so. Then I added you to my feedreader.

Most of you will know what a feedreader is, but in case you do not, click here for info. The quick run down – it is an awesome program which collects new articles that bloggers post. So when you post something new, I get a copy, and if I have the time and something to say, I will click through and comment. If you want to get a feed reader, I highly recommend Inoreader, which I have been using a lot lately.

At the end of 6 months or so, if I am still loving your blog as much as I did when I added you to my feed reader, I will add you to my permanent blogroll.. YAY!

November New Feed Review –

And it has now been six months since November, so I have gone through the regular monthly review process. Here are the blogs I am keeping –